The pedagogic purpose of "The Great Divorce" is to correct a misunderstanding of a misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of Hell, to clarify what Dante saw written over the gates of the Inferno: "Justice moved my High Maker: Divine Power made me Wisdom Supreme, and Primal Love." The original misunderstanding was to think of the Law of God in terms of the laws of men, that is, as something He imposes on individuals, with or without their consent, and for breaking which He imposes, without their consent, an eternal penalty. If this were true, it would really imply that there were two Gods, an imminent God the Creator, and a transcendent God the Judge, and against such a dualism liberal theology very properly reacted—Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" is one of the great polemics in this reaction. In adopting in its stead a doctrine of inevitable progress, however, liberalism denied freedom in another way, for, if the Love of God is omnipotent in the sense that sooner or later I shall be compelled to recognize it, then my present freedom to refuse is only apparent, and when my sins get me into trouble I may reasonably complain that it was very unkind of God not to exercise his omnipotence earlier. If I am not eternally free, I am not free at all….
Like an increasing number of modern works of art, "The Great Divorce" revives the medieval literary device of the dream and, since Mr. Lewis is a distinguished medieval scholar, revives it with unusual ease and facility. There is a celestial bus which visits the Grey Town, where the streets are endless, sinister, and mean, "always in the rain and always in evening twilight," to pick up any passengers who wish to visit the Green Plain…. One of the ghosts asks the driver when they have got to be back and is told: "You need never come back unless you want to. Stay as long as you please." To the ghosts everything seems unbearably solid, the flowers hard as diamonds, the leaves heavy as sacks of coal, but to the solid people who come to meet them, since they are equally real, nature is natural.
